Magic Realism?
Halcyon
Phyllis Cole-Dai
: Can anyone explain this form of fiction? Thanks, -Halcyon
--
______________________________________________________
"The thing thou cravest so awaits in the distance/ Wrapped in the silence,
unseen and dumb,/ Essential to thy soul and thy existence./ Live worthy of
it, call . . .and it shall come." -- Ella Wheeler Wilcox
M Barnard
works, done well enough that the work remains literary. It's
frequently referred to as South American magic realism, simply since the
foremost practitioners are from SA, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
author of _One Hundred Years of Solitude_.
This book is the tale of a single family in Central America(?), the village
they found, the children they have, the wars they fight, the deaths they die.
That's the realism part. They also find diamonds in oranges, have children
born with tails or with fatal and cursed beauty, have family ghosts, discover
ancient ancestors still living in distant rooms of the house. Their fortunes,
upswings and dissolutions mirror the larger political surreality occuring
around them. Hence the magic.
It is fiction where the fantasy unfolds from the commonplace, and is accepted
as commonplace, where a chest of ice or a magnet brought by gypsies is more
fantastic to the characters than a plague which causes them to slowly forget
the labels for everything around them.
Hope this helps,
M
bar...@io.org - http://www.io.org/~barnard/web/barnard.htm -
"Old wood to burn! Old wine to drink! Old friends to trust!
Old authors to read!" Francis Bacon
claguire
> Can anyone explain this form of fiction?
Magic Realism is a form of fantasy. Usually it manifests magic as a part
of real, everyday life--rather like folktales do. It takes it's soul from
what we believe, sometimes illogically.
It's been a long time since I've been in college, so I don't know if this
is still the "official" definition or not. Probably not. Still, it has
been very popular for some time, both in literary and genre. I think some
of the genre magazines are getting tired of the sameness of some of the
stories these days, however, so it has to be good to publish in a
commercial magazine these days.
Camille
Christina Bronnestam EHS/LD 80336 2838
I hope anyone will like "realistic magic". That's what I am trying to write.
Do not ask me how...
/Christina
Alison Dellenbaugh
> Magic Realism is a form of fantasy. Usually it manifests magic as a part
> of real, everyday life--rather like folktales do. It takes it's soul from
> what we believe, sometimes illogically.
> It's been a long time since I've been in college, so I don't know if this
> is still the "official" definition or not. Probably not. Still, it has
> been very popular for some time, both in literary and genre. I think some
> of the genre magazines are getting tired of the sameness of some of the
> stories these days, however, so it has to be good to publish in a
> commercial magazine these days.
I was just looking at the latest issue of _Story_, in which they announced the
short-short story contest winners. They said the top three winners all had
fantastical elements in them. (In contrast, the main topic they received
entries on...and were bored by...was physical or emotional abuse. I am
chagrined to say that my failed entry dealt with that topic as well!)
--Alison D.
Michael O'Kane
that Garcia Marquez, father of the boom in Latin American fiction as well
as what literary critics have come to call magical realism, is really a
notary, in the civil law sense.
Because his reality is so different from what Americans know, it all seems
so magical. It's not, it's just a very different reality.
mok...@pipeline.com
Larry Bassel/Barbara Frezza
They also find diamonds in oranges, have children
>born with tails or with fatal and cursed beauty, have family ghosts,
discover
>ancient ancestors still living in distant rooms of the house. Their
fortunes,
>upswings and dissolutions mirror the larger political surreality
occuring
>around them. Hence the magic.
>
>It is fiction where the fantasy unfolds from the commonplace, and is
accepted
>as commonplace, where a chest of ice or a magnet brought by gypsies is
more
>fantastic to the characters than a plague which causes them to slowly
forget
>the labels for everything around them.
>
You mean everybody's family ISN'T like this?
BArbara
Janice
In article <4ljrvd$7...@opal.southwind.net>, Halcyon <hal...@horizon.hit.net> says:
>
>Can anyone explain this form of fiction? Thanks, -Halcyon
>
It's a world in which everything seems normal..even very strange things, like rain for 100 years.
Different from speculative fiction in that it seems to be our ordinary world with jsut a few
changes, which everyone seems to take for granted...
try Marquez...or Barthes, or Italo Calvino...or Robert Kroetsch...
cheers,
jan
Nell
In article <4lrhj4$c...@hermes.oanet.com>, Janice <jmac...@oanet.com>
writes
And Angela Carter...
--
Nell
rit...@cruzio.com
Once again, waiting around for the original post gets me nowhere, and watching
the succeeding posts gets me an opening.
In article <claguire-240...@pm097-08.dialip.mich.net>,
clag...@alpha.lansing.cc.mi.us (claguire) writes:
> In article <4ljrvd$7...@opal.southwind.net>, Halcyon
> <hal...@horizon.hit.net> wrote:
>
> > Can anyone explain this form of fiction?
>
> Magic Realism is a form of fantasy. Usually it manifests magic as a part
> of real, everyday life--rather like folktales do. It takes it's soul from
> what we believe, sometimes illogically.
And M. Barnard gives a longer version of the same thing, including a discussion
of _One Hundred Years of Solitude. But there are a couple of salient things
about magical realism that I think are important.
1) the "realism" is social realism -- the people who are in these stories are
generally more firmly rooted in society than in the physical world. They have
class and class consciousness, they belong to specific (even if fictional)
communities -- they even have relationships to the means of production.
1a) also the landscape is realist, even if it is not real. The places have
climate and weather, geology and flora and fauna, and (again) social geography
too. The dust is a certain color: the rain comes at a certain season: the
weeds have a certain smell. And if this is violated, it's done in a cogent,
integral way, and it's fantasy, not error.
2) the fantasy is a method for storytelling and not a reason for storytelling.
If there's a ghost, it's not because the story is a ghost story: it's because
the ghost is a useful character for executing the plot.
Lucy Kemnitzer
--
Everything is up to date in Atom City.
In Atom City, crime by individuals is against the law.
M Barnard
In article <4lrhj4$c...@hermes.oanet.com>, jmac...@oanet.com (Janice) wrote:
>In article <4ljrvd$7...@opal.southwind.net>, Halcyon <hal...@horizon.hit.net>
>
>try Marquez...or Barthes, or Italo Calvino...or Robert Kroetsch...
I'm actually not sure that I'd include Robert Kroetsch. The book of his that
I'm thinking of, _Badlands_, was not magic realism in my eyes, but rather
contained a character that told extremely tall tales. The difference is that
the magic in magic realism is there, accepted, and witnessed by both reliable
and unreliable narrators. I'm not as widely read in Kroetsch as I am in
Hodges, Atwood, Findlay, Richler, et al, so my opinion is not solidly based.
Did you have another book in mind?
Another Canadian work, _The Invention of the World_, by Jack Hodges, seems
much closer to magic realism to me.
Later,